Modern telephone systems, such as a land line telephone or a wireless cellular telephone, include the ability to leave a voice message for the owner or user of the telephone. Typically, a caller to the phone number of that phone will hear a voicemail greeting telling the caller to leave a message. After the greeting, the caller has the opportunity to leave a message which is recorded on a voicemail system. In certain embodiments, the voicemail is recorded locally on a storage device which is part of a telephone in the case of certain land line phones, or the voicemail may be recorded on a voicemail server maintained in the infrastructure of a public telephone carrier, such as AT&T or Verizon or Verizon Wireless.
These voicemails are recorded and maintained for later use by the owner or operator of the telephone device for which the voicemail account was established. For example, the user of the telephone device may connect to the voicemail server through a telephone call to the voicemail server to listen to one or more voicemails stored at the voicemail server. Current systems provide a very minimal user interface to the user with respect to the voicemails stored at the voicemail server. For example, on a typical wireless cellular telephone, the user is presented with a notification which indicates the number of voicemails. FIG. 1 shows an example of a display of a telephone device, such as a wireless cellular telephone. The display 10 includes an indication 11 which shows that there are two voicemails, which may be new voicemails not listened to by the user. The user must then obtain access to those voicemails by connecting to the voicemail server through a telephone call. During that phone call, the user is prompted to enter commands to cause playback of the voicemail messages. The playback sequence is constrained by the order in which the voicemails were recorded or received at the voicemail server. In other words, the user must access each voicemail one after another in a series based upon the time of receipt of the voicemail.
This user interface prevents the user from randomly picking and choosing voicemails for listening and forces the user to go through each and every voicemail to determine which voicemails are important and which are not important.